Dave Newman

A Letter To Amazing

Dear Joan Jobe Smith—

You have the best stories. I sometimes think of my luck, that I know someone who go-go danced at the world-famous Whiskey a Go Go while rockstars did what rockstars did 50 years ago. Jim Morrison drunk, singing Rimbaud. I know you had horrible husbands and no money and kids that needed raised and pecan tress of talent waiting to bloom.

I owe you a letter, which is silly because I owe you everything.

We’ve known each other for more than twenty years and met exactly once. I’m thankful and sad. I wish we’d been rich and drank champagne at breakfast. 

When I was a senior in college, I lived in a transient motel in Irwin, just off Route 30. I had a couple jobs and lived on noodles and booze. I ate stress like candy and dreamed poetry was a house I’d build and that house would be made of enough money to allow me to create art. But I knew it was bullshit. I looked like a landscaper and sometimes worked as a landscaper. I stole a lot and felt embarrassed for stealing because I read so much. I worked so much. My face looked like a whiskey bottle. My face looked like a whiskey bottle made of broken glass. I spilled everywhere. I read poetry every second, every minute. My apartment was one room and a bathroom. The couch was a bed but I mostly slept on the floor. I got laid a lot from a crazy chick who was rich but sometimes stole money from my wallet. I was fine with that. I read your poems in The Wormwood Review about raising kids and crazy husbands and cooking beans and raising kids, kids from all kinds of crazy husbands, so many poems, all of them brilliant. I wrote to someone who knew you had a book on Event Horizon Press and somehow, I found Event Horizon’s phone number and called to order your first book, which seemed inconceivable, a first book, only one book, because I’d read so many of your brilliant poems that I assumed you were a god made of poetry and wisdom.

I gave the publisher my credit card number over the phone.

He said “Can you give me those again?”

I did.

He said “It’s not going through for some reason.”

The reason was because I’d paid for all my textbooks and not made the bill.

I said “I’ll send you a money order” and I did.

I waited for a week by the mailbox.

Then I read Jehovah Jukebox 3 times the day it arrived and have been reading it ever since. You danced and you sang and you married poorly and you loved Charles Bukowski and you drove a VW Beatle and fell over your children to make better lives for them.

I knew you before I knew you.

You married a brilliant poet, Fred Voss, after so many bad men.

I married a poet and gave her your book and she fell in love with your words because she saw your world in her life and our life and all the lives of the men and women she knew. She was a professor but barely, making less than she did as a flight attendant. She took your book to class. She gave it to students. They loved you.

She gave it to her feminist colleague who said “I don’t get it.”

Fuck her.

Women who write about the body seldom know what the body is.

One day, when I was working 60 hours a week and dying and trying not to die because I had a son and a wife I loved, I came home from my job and found a letter from you in my mailbox. You’d read one of my stories in a magazine over in England that didn’t hate working-class folks. You said so many nice things. It was like getting a letter from god shaped like Charles Bukowski in a woman’s body. Your handwriting looked like curls made of art.

Years later, we’d hug.

I was probably too embarrassed to say my world would have died if you wouldn’t have written, not to me, but your poems. 

Thanks, Joan.

I am here because you believed in yourself enough to make art.

I’ll get you that letter soon.

I owe you so much more.

Love,
Newman

 

I Always Loved That Raymond Carver Poem “Late Fragment” Which Starts:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?

then says

I did

and ends

to feel myself
beloved on this Earth 

and now I am older than
Raymond Carver when he died
and my grandparents are gone
and my parents are old
and I sometimes think of what I want
and how to feel beloved feels so outrageous.

I want to be a good father.
I want to be a good son.
I want to be a good husband.
I want to have pals.
I want to be a good writer.
I want the people that I love
to know that I love them.
I want people to know
that they are beloved on this earth.

If you could kiss my ass a little, thanks.

 

Dave Newman is the author of seven books, and lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley.